


Live Long And Prosper

by nostalgia



Category: Star Trek: Voyager
Genre: Gen, Oldfic, this really bothered me on telly
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-01-05
Updated: 2003-01-05
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:20:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22133176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nostalgia/pseuds/nostalgia
Summary: Harry Kim is dead; long live Harry Kim.
Kudos: 8





	Live Long And Prosper

Oddly, no one ever mentions that he’s dead.

True, it was a long time ago, and true, people don’t like to talk about things like that… but sometimes he wonders if they’ve all forgotten. He, on the other hand, is still very much aware of it.

Three years ago, more or less to the day, Harry Kim died.

Except that this Harry Kim, the one who lies in bed staring at the ceiling and wondering if he’ll ever feel like he belongs in this reality, is not, and has never been, clinically dead. He’s been close a couple of times, and his heart has stopped on at least one occasion, but he’s never actually died.

The Harry Kim who left Earth on this Voyager, who replicated the clarinet lying on the coffee table, who brought the family photographs that lie in the drawer next to the bed, died three years ago. Three years, more or less to the day.

But no one ever mentions that. No one seems to remember that Harry Kim and Naomi Wildman should by all rights be dead.

Everyone tells him that the Harry Kim who died was the same person, that all the details are correct. But sometimes he wonders, when he can’t quite remember an event, and worries that it never really happened to him, that it’s a false memory put there by everyone assuming that he’s their Harry Kim.

He makes a conscious effort not to spend much time with the Wildmans, as if there’s an in-built limit on this new existence, and if the Universe remembers what they’ve done everything will snap back to the way it was, the way it should be. So far as he knows, Naomi has no idea that she isn’t the little girl who was born on this ship. When he visits sickbay, he can’t help wondering where she was in the room when she died that first time, that very real death that the two of them have cheated.

He thought – or maybe hoped – that B’Elanna was going to mention it once, when they were on shore leave and horribly drunk. Just for a second, she stared at him, opened her mouth to say something. But then she changed her mind, and he didn’t have the guts to ask her what she had been about to say. Maybe it was something else, maybe she’s forgotten that she saw him die once.

But they’ve cheated the odds so many times on this journey, why should death be any different? Sometimes he wonders if infinity has turned a blind eye to the lost ship, if the afterlife doesn’t want them anymore. They should all have died in Borg space, and everyone on board knows that. When they say so out loud, they raise a glass to Captain Janeway, who cheats the law of averages with a delicate finesse, but maybe inside some of them wonder, the way he does.

Ensign D’Kella once suggested that Janeway had sold her soul to Mt’Craza to keep most of them alive and get them home. B’Elanna had laughed at the idea, and said that if Janeway sold her soul to any demon, it had better make sure it kept a receipt. And anyway, that was all just superstition. Harry had laughed as well, but replaced the alien devil with one from his own mythology. Stranger things had happened.

And maybe… Maybe…

He certainly wouldn’t put it past her, and he wonders if his soul is still his own. Not that he believes in things like that, not that he’s lapsing into paranoia on occasion.

But the one thing he knows for certain is that he should by rights be dead. That he isn’t the man everyone thinks of him as, that he sleeps in a corpse’s bed and laughs with friends who aren’t quite his own.

Three years, more or less to the day. He wonders if he’ll ever forget that fact.


End file.
